Axial Staff Software Engineer interview questions

First, I had a 45 minute first round interview with the hiring manager. They took time to answer my questions. Next was a take home assignment. They asked it be time boxed with 4 hours, but I went a bit over. The question was best solved as a regex, which did not feel like a common real world scenario. I had a week to fit this in, which was fine. Then I moved onto a virtual on-site. They requested I prepare some system diagrams of an app I worked on as part of this, which I felt was a more invasive and ran right up to 'trade secrets' of other projects. It took me 14 hours, to put together that was something that was real, but also not a violation of past IP. I did this on four days notice. The on-site was a 4.5 hour interview including: * A product demo and Q&A with a product owner. I thought this went well. * Coding which made some changes to my take home assignment live by sharing my screen. This went well, but the third change they wanted to make was complex regex edits, which I declined to do under the stress and time constraints of an interview. We spoke high level about approach and they seemed happy with it. * System Design which included walking over my pre-prepared diagrams and discussing them. This team skipped any formalities such as introductions, which felt like they had no desire to know anything about me, which was awkward. We also disagreed on the definition of what a microservice was. * Behavioral: Standard questions about challenges. * HR: This seemed like a formality. I was told I would hear back in two days, but got silence for a week, and had to press the recruiter a few times for an informal rejection. If I made it past this phase, a third stage would have been an interview with the company founder before a final offer. Summary: over 5 hours talking to them, around 20 hours on take home assignments.